The Law and the Poor

by Sir Edward Abbott Parry

The servant, you will recollect, pleaded with the king, saying, “Have patience with me, and I will pay thee all.” Debtors have not altered much since that date, and the text has a familiar ring in the ears of a County Court judge. The lord of that servant, being moved by compassion, released him and forgave him the debt. This is important to remember, for the servant being forgiven his debt was without excuse for his subsequent contemptible conduct. And, indeed, I have often found that men who have been most leniently treated in their own failures by those in a better position, are themselves most greedy in extorting the uttermost farthing from their smaller victims. Speaking generally, it is not the most desirable class of trader that makes use of the debt-collecting system of the County Court.

The servant of the parable was the meanest of curs. He “went out, and found one of his fellow-servants, which owed him a hundred pence: and he laid hold on him, and took him by the throat, saying, Pay what thou owest.” Here, again, we may flatter ourselves on our superior procedure. If this had happened in Lambeth, the servant would not have been allowed to go for his fellow servant with such jubilant audacity. Nowadays everything would be done in legal decency and order. The debt being for a hundred pence, and, therefore, being within the jurisdiction of the County Court, a summons would have to be issued, fees would have to be paid to the Treasury and the Court officials, and a lot of money spent and added to the debt before imprisonment followed. Still the rough-and-ready methods of the earlier centuries were certainly cheaper, and the result was much the same. For we read that, though the fellow-servant pleaded in the same formula, “Have patience with me, and I will pay thee,” the creditor of the hundred pence stood firm for his rights and cast his fellow servant into prison till he should pay his due.

And if this had been a repertory drama and not a parable, the curtain had fallen on that scene and one would have come away depressed with the abjectness of human nature and with a cold feeling that the world was a drab uncomfortable place. But the ancient dramatic stories always have a happy ending. There is more of the spirit of the old Adelphi than of the Gaiety Theatre, Manchester, about the parables. The lord hears of his servant’s scurvy behaviour and, to the delight of all sane men of child-like and simple faith, the wicked servant is delivered to the tormentors till he shall pay all that was due.

I confess that my legal mind has been haunted with the thought that, the lord having forgiven the servant his debt, it was rather a strong order for him to go back on that forgiveness. Doubtless there was no consideration for the forgiveness, it was nudum pactum, or there may have been an implied contract that the servant should do unto others as he had been done by, but I rather expect the lord and his advisers only considered the justice of their act rather than its technical legal accuracy. But one thing we can rejoice in. There is the dramatic story, and no one can construe it into approval of any form of imprisonment for debt.

I know that many who do not regard the Bible as an authority will not be troubled about this testimony; probably many more who do read the Scriptures for guidance will be pained that anyone should make use of holy words to upset a system that they find so useful in the commercial weekdays of life. Moreover, some will shake their heads and remind me that “the devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.” That is true enough. But it will be a very clever devil who can cite any Scripture in support of section 5 of the Debtors Act, 1869.

And I will pass away from scriptural precedents to others which, though to me they possess a less compelling sanction, will perhaps have more weight with men of the world. In the history of ancient Greece the debtor played an important part. Let me remind you what the Archon did.

The particular Archon I refer to is Solon.

Solon knew all about imprisonment for debt, and his evidence on the subject is most convincing. It is well to remember, too, that Solon was a business man—I have this from Grote, who got it, I fancy, from Plutarch. Exekestides, Solon’s father, a gentleman of the purest heroic blood, “diminished his substance by prodigality,” and young Solon had to go into business; in modern phrase, he “went on the road,” and saw a lot of the world in Greece and Asia. I mention this because I am always told that if I knew anything of business I should understand the necessity of imprisonment for debt. Solon was emphatically a business man. Solon was also a poet, which perhaps was his best asset as a social reformer, but he was no sentimentalist if, as some say, when he was a general attacking a rebellious city he ordered the wells to be poisoned to put an end to the strife.

When Solon in a time of grand social upheaval was made Archon, he found the poorer population, including particularly the cultivating tenants, weighed down by debts and driven in large numbers out of freedom and into slavery. Let me set down the condition of things in the careful words of Grote lest I appear to exaggerate.

“All the calamitous effects were here seen of the old harsh law of debtor and creditor—once prevalent in Greece, Italy, Asia, and a large portion of the world—combined with the recognition of slavery as a legitimate status, and of the right of one man to sell himself as well as that of another man to buy him. Every debtor unable to fulfil his contract was liable to be adjudged as the slave of his creditor, until he could find means either of paying it or working it out; and not only he himself, but his minor sons and unmarried daughters and sisters also, whom the law gave him the power of selling. The poor man thus borrowed upon the security of his body (to translate literally the Greek phrase) and upon that of the persons in his family.”